How to change the "Older post" marker in your blogger template

This post is an answer to a question posted on Blogcatalog group "Blogger"
Here is the question posted by Jules66 (or Julie-Anne):

I am wanting to change the 'older posts' link on the bottom of my blogs, to say 'next page' instead.

Does anyone know how I can do it without losing all my stuff on my blog ?

I did quick google for an answer but the sites that say how to do it, don't apply to my style blog.

Thank you in advance for your help

I am not an expert, and just explaining the way that I understand that you could do it. If there is a better way, you are most welcome to let me know. I also certainly don't take any responsibilty for any loss or damage to your blog. You follow my advice at your own risk. I did try it out on a couple of blogs of mine. I have one blog that I use for just that (trying things out.) I will not give you the URL. It is just a muck around blog. But I also did it with text for Desert Dad which is my 'show off my kids blog.'

1. First of all, I don't want to be bias towards a specific browser, but for this purpose I just love using Mozilla. Chrome seems to muck it up, and I am not a big Internet Explorer fan. I am going to explain following myself along in Mozilla. I am sure if you use a different browser it shouldn't be to tricky to figure out what works differently. It shouldn't be much


2. Open your blogger dashboard, and log in.


3. If you have more than one blog, choose which one you would like to edit, and click on "layout"


4. When the "Blogger: Edit Layout" page is up, right click on the "View Blog" link and click "Open Link in new Tab". Each time you want to see how you are doing, you can just re-load that page, and just leave your editing page alone. It's just the way I like to work.


5. Now, go to where it says "Edit HTML". If you are new to fiddling around in there, perhaps I should point out a couple things. First of all, you can click "Download Full Template". This way, if you really stuff things up, you can just re-load what you had before. If you are really worried about this, perhaps read a little about it in blogger help. The second thing is the "Clear Edits" link at the bottom. This is like a reset button before you have saved your changes. If you think it's just not going well, hit the "Clear Edits" and things go back to how they were when you last saved.


6. Now click "Expand Widget Template" and let it re-load.


7. No comes the trick. You need to find this code
   
   

   
   <a class='blog-pager-older-link' expr:href='data:olderPageUrl' expr:id='data:widget.instanceId + &quot;_blog-pager-older-link&quot;' expr:title='data:olderPageTitle'><data:olderPageTitle/></a>
   

   
   


8. If you know much about html you will know that a link has three parts, and this bit is just the same. The first bit:
   

   
   <a class='blog-pager-older-link' expr:href='data:olderPageUrl' expr:id='data:widget.instanceId + &quot;_blog-pager-older-link&quot;' expr:title='data:olderPageTitle'>
   

   
   and the last bit:
   

   
   </a>
   

   
   surround the bit in the middle:
   

   
   <data:olderPageTitle/>
   

   
   


9. Now, that bit <data:olderPageTitle/> is a reference in xml to what should be placed there. But you can just remove the reference and put anything you want there. For example, if you wanted to use "next page" you could do this:
   

   
   
   <a class='blog-pager-older-link' expr:href='data:olderPageUrl' expr:id='data:widget.instanceId + &quot;_blog-pager-older-link&quot;' expr:title='data:olderPageTitle'><p>Next Page</p></a>
   

   
   All you have done is slip the <p>Next Page</p> code into that link.
   


10. There are different ways that you could play with that. You could empasis it by changing the p tag to strong
    

    
    <strong>Next Page</strong>
    

    
    Or you could use an image like this one:
    

    

    
    I am not going to go into details now, but I would be happy to if you are interested. You need to do something like this: Upload the image to your Picasa web album, get the URL (where it is just the image, not a page it's on.) You will need to put it into the right code:
    

    <img src="theImageURL">

    
    and you then need to go to a site like Blogcrowds parse html page and change the code before pasting that into the same place you put the other code explained above.


11. 
    Now you need to save it. In the separate page you opened at the beginning, just click 'refresh' and if it worked fine, it should show you the new text in place of the "Older Post"
    

If you would like to use the image above, you are most welcome. For a link back to this site I would make an even nicer one, based on the colors of your blog. Just save it as an image on your computer, don't just use the linked URL.

I did find a good post about covering this. I just wanted to check that I was not going to blow up your blog. Check out Blogspottutorial


Hey, if you found this blog and you are not Julie-Anne, you may want to check out her blogs:
Chatterblog
and
Images by Julie-Anne

Track your visitors

If you have a blog or a website, one of the most important things to you is to know how many people are hitting on your website. The more you know the more you can focus on the user when you manage your blog.

Since I am working on my website I needed to put some tracking in.

I hate to use little trackers that show you how many people have been there right on the site. Why would you do that? I don't know. And for many of those you have to pay.

I use Google Analytics. It really is a very useful way to keep track of your site.

It is rather easy to use. I just wanted to be sure, when I put updated the tracking code for blogger that I do it the same way, and found a useful blog to do that with, called CeoXi DeSign.

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Web site development - your measuring stick

Anyone who is developing content for the Internet needs to consider who is going to read it, and what they are going to get out of it.

To that end, as I am developing a website, I have done a lot of reading on usability. I am very interested in creating the best website that I can.

There are several URLs that I keep going back to. They are my measuring stick to see if I am on track. I will not say that the website is perfect. Certainly not. But I think it has been very useful to look at things like this. Here are some links to super useful stuff before you publish anything on the Internet, read:

Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
A definitive source of information about making your website work for an audience on the Internet.

50 Web Usability Tips that Help You Attract and Retain Visitors to Your Website
It is on the DoshDosh blog, which itself is worth following if you are serious about your presence on the Internet, especially if you are blogging. Each time I start to work on something big on the Internet, I come back to this post. I find it one of the most useful I have read on the Internet.

The other thing is your own common sense. If you are blogging or doing a website for a specific audience, perhaps you know more about the reading habits of that audience than those 'usability' experts do. If you are in a very academic field, for example, your readers may read more of the content of the website than the norm on the Internet.

Lastly, use your friends. Other's eyes can be great to help you find and weed out the obvious mistakes that you missed. The most important thing to ask them is, did you actually read it all. If not, delete some, make it more readable, break it up more with useful headers and so on.

What I am up to

Well, I haven't done anything to promote this site. It isn't even linked to my profile yet. But somehow people find it. So I must post in it. I was hoping that it would live in a secret corner of the internet until I had put in some really useful posts.

Seriously, I will not post to often. It's more an outlet, and when I have something that I am working on, their will be occasional floods of stuff.

So currently I am building a website. Frantic Naturalist Nature Tours Directory. I am having a lot of fun with it. HTML (and CSS) is so much like Lego blocks. You can build what you like. I hope to at least post a provisional bit of the site by tonight (in about 10 hours from now.) If you live in Africa you become all to aware that many people on the internet are in different time zones. Actually, I guess that goes for a lot of the world??

Anyway, when the website is up, and you would like to have a look, you should find the HTML very fairly easy to understand. I comment a lot. If I use id or class or whatever tags, the names I make up usually make sense (as opposed to stuff done on a html editor.) I coded the whole thing in a text editor (Notepad.) So it is really basic.

It's a really fun website for me to run, as it's sort of a combination of my interests - computer stuff and nature/travel stuff.

The progression

How to get into the whole thing. You want to learn to be a hot shot programmer, but you know nothing about it at all. Or perhaps bits and peaces, but it doesn't fit together.

Everyone is different, and you'll hear different advice, but my recomendation is this.

First, get a blogger account. This is free through Google. You don't really need to know a thing to set it up. Then start to play with it. Set up RSS feeds, maybe place some adds. Start to look at the code, and get a feeling for how it fits together. You can break it, it's okay. It's for learning.

Blogging itself is fun, and can involve advanced programming stuff if you take it all the way.

Then next thing is to learn HTML. This is the mark-up language used by browsers to understand what to write on your page. We'll talk more about it later.

Then get into more web stuff, like CSS and so on.

Now your have had a feel for a bit of how programming might feel, but you haven't really programmed yet. Now it's time to change gears. I recommend the next step should be learning Python. I have made my way well into Python and will share what I have learned.

Then, I think the next step is to learn C++. This is really the serious stuff. From there you really can learn anything.

So, if you want, you can take a wonder with me and this blog, while you work your way through this progression.

Non Nerd Hacking - About

What's our blog all about? It's my journey as a tour guide and nature person, into the world of blogging, computers, internet, web design and some programming.

I am hoping that my journey into this world is of some use to others who are doing the same. I will give you the websites that helped me, advice and perhaps some tutorials. As I fumble my way in, I will try to use this blog to help others by sharing what I have learned.

The main topics to begin with will be:

Blogging, HTML, CSS, PYTHON and C++

Hacking in the sense of serious programming. I am not sugesting that you, or I are yet hackers. Just using the word to refer to getting serious about doing things under the hood on your computer.